First Snow in Kansas
by StrangeLittleSwirl
Summary: A Hilltop Cafe patron watches the newly returned DG's interactions with two strange customers. Oneshot.


Title: First Snow in Kansas  
Author: **littleswirl**  
Pairing: Cain/DG  
Rating: PG  
Summary: A Hilltop Café patron watches the newly returned DG's interactions with two strange customers. One-Shot  
Disclaimer: It's routine by now, right? La la, was L. Frank Baum's, da di da, Sci Fi's adaption. Do be doo don't own, just play with. New characters are mine.  
Word Count: 1,600

DG was everyone's favorite waitress at the Hilltop Café. You did not have to be Anna Sue, the corner table resident knitter who nursed her free cup of hot tea for an average of four and a half hours everyday to know that.

She was observant, of course. Agatha Christie _really_ was more educational than entertainment. When the girl returned a year later, she was not the same. Anna Sue would get her tea within five minutes of ordering. Pie was received while still fresh from the oven, instead of cold and when she suddenly remembered to get it. She arrived on time to work.

DG served food with a smile, helped her customers in every way she could. She only took her designated break time, drawing like she used to, but stopping and returning to work before her fifteen minutes was up. Carter, loud and audible from in the kitchen, would crow praises to no end. Her little hiatus did the girl some good.

One day Anna Sue even saw her parents come in, beaming and handing her a paper. Her wide blue eyes widened in surprise.

"Straight A's!" her father cried, picking her up and whirling her around. The locals, who knew the girl and her struggles with academia, lightly applauded. She knit her a lovely light blue scarf with silver sequins in it. She wore it almost everyday in the colder months.

Today was December 1st, which meant that Julia, the other waitress, and DG were leaning on chairs and starting the multiple day process of decorating the café. Anna Sue had purchased some wool dyed in green and red to start her grandchildren's sweaters. This year they would have Scottie dogs on them. With little real satin bows.

"Oh," cried DG as she started to fall. It sounded like she was more surprised than scared.

And it turned out she really had not needed to be scared, because a very nice-and very handsome, Anna Sue noticed-young man had caught her.

"Got you," he said, unnecessarily. She stared up at him, eyes wide and closely the same color as his.

He seemed to wait for whatever it was she was going to say.

"Coffee?" she asked finally, and he put her down. This seemed to disappoint him. He muttered a "sure".

He came every day, watching her as she made her perfect, flawless circuit around the place. She never really noticed.

Now, Anna Sue and the other regulars were quite protective of their darling DG, but this young man-whom they had decided to call 'The Cowboy', after his southern swagger and dress-was not leering; there was nothing alarming about the way he watched her. It was something _more_ in his look, protective and a little more that Anna Sue wasn't quite sure of. Maybe she knew what it was, but DG did not know him, so it couldn't possibly be _that_.

Anna Sue did not count how many days later it was until the other man started showing up with The Cowboy, who was greet warmly. She did not have to. They arrived on the same day that DG, with a cough, set up the small Christmas tree on the edge of the counter. That meant it was four days.

The newcomer might have had some sort of emotional instability. He always had some sort of hat on-usually dizzyingly knit in an intarsia that Anna Sue envied. He repeated things, talked loudly. The other man, who never gave his name and who was never given one, was a new, funny regular just as quickly as the cowboy.

DG would always serve them. They called her 'princess'. She would smile at them and head of to the next table. Sometimes the two men would argue in hushed tones, frequently pointing at her. She never seemed to notice.

They came every day, and even started to mingle with Anna Sue and the others. The two men were nice, if not a bit rough around the edges. "Passing through", they would reply when asked why they were there. "Trying to find an old friend."

Anna Sue noticed little things. Like the little silver that poked, occasionally, out from under the strange man's hat. The small, barely there, tan line on the Cowboy's left ring finger. The look of loss and sadness on his face as he watched DG.

She could not stand by any longer.

"DG, I think that Cowboy is holding a torch for you," she stage whispered to the young woman as she brought her the tea cup that had been stained with her own violet lipstick after ten years of use. DG gave her a crooked grin.

"Well he's not too bad looking, nor is he a bad tipper. Guess he just has to say something."

DG did not even look over at their table when she passed it the first time. And the Cowboy had heard and was staring. DG smirked as she sauntered to another customer.

She waited to refill their cups last in her rounds, just before going to get the grilled cheese waiting for the tourist family at table seven.

"Thanks, princess." The Cowboy gave her a sad smile.

"You _could_ call me DG, you know, but only after you told me _your_ name. I certainly don't look like a princess."

The funny one gave the Cowboy a funny look, elbowing him.

The Cowboy took of his hat, "The name's Cain. And you do to me."

What happened next would always remain with Anna Sue as sort of strange. She had been working on a stockinette, and since it was second nature, she had been looking at the table in a bout of admitted nosiness.

DG gave him a winning smile and started to turn. Half way through the motion, however, she frowned, and then her eyes opened wide. The coffee pot would have fallen if it wasn't for the Cowboy-Cain-reaching out and grabbing it.

"Wyatt," she muttered before crumpling.

Anna Sue had to applaud him. In an instant he had caught her _and_ placed the coffee pot on the table. He followed her towards the floor, cradling her to his chest and looking scared. The other Regulars started to push back their chairs and make their way over.

"DG, sweetheart," he said, repeating her name and sweet things, giving her a small shake. Someone called for a doctor, but then the unconscious girl woke up.

The waitress did not seemed surprised to be on the floor. Instead, she smiled, and Anna Sue knew that look. It was the way the skin around her eyes creased, and the warmth in her expression that reminded her of the smile she gave her husband, and the one her daughter-in-law gave her dear Jimmy.

"Hello, Wyatt," she said simply before turning. "Hey, Glitch."

"Hello, Princess!" he said loudly, then frowned. "How did you get on the floor?"

She laughed, and sat up, accepting the Cowboy's help. DG waved off everyone's concern and told them she just slipped, and everything was fine.

Suddenly she was all sunshine and smiles and there wasn't a trace of that perfectly polished DG that had worried the Regulars. When the Cowboy helped her up, he pulled her into a fierce hug, and her laughter was light and beautiful as she accepted it. Anna Sue saw, suddenly, what had been missing. That inexplicable inner glow that DG had always had was back.

"Told you you'd warm up to them," she said. "Did it work?"

"Az is fine, DG. You saved her," the man, Cain said, brushing hair out of her face. "We just thought sending you back here to recuperate was the right thing."

Anna Sue finished her scarf that night, and felt that she should give it to her then. And the strange man's hat, and the cowboy's scarf. It was a good thing, too, because it was months before she saw DG again, and she would return with a ring on her finger-and the Cowboy's, and as she sat at the counter in her fine clothes, he would place a possessive hand on her stomach and grin back at her.

But on that day, DG waved goodbye to Anna Sue and Carter, and the strange man asked her how she had gotten there. And as Carter he told her it was time to get home to her Golden Girl episodes, she watched the three outside the window. The chapeaux-wearing man gave her a hug, and deposited her back on the ground.

Anna Sue almost missed it.

DG, still in her blue gingham waitress uniform, slung her arms around the neck of the cowboy and removed his hat with a lazy smirk. Anna Sue did not have to hear it, she saw her say 'I love you' to the man she called Wyatt. He leaned down to kiss her just as it started to snow in Kansas for the first time in almost a decade.

Anna Sue wrote a book, inspired by what she had seen that day, elaborating and taking quite a few liberties with the three. It did moderately well, and she did a book signing tour of several local malls. The grandmother got to take the kids to an amusement park in California with the money.

In the book, DG was a lost princess who had forgotten who she was and the Cowboy was, in fact, a cowboy, and the strange man had lost part of his brain. She was halfway through writing it when she realized it was a bit like Wizard of Oz, so she threw in a cowardly lion, for good measure. And a yellow brick road.

It ended happily, with the princess giving the cowboy a heart.


End file.
